Amazon Unbox: A Linux user’s perspective
Sunday, March 11th, 2007Amazon Unbox is this new on-demand video service from Amazon that they released back in September of 2006. Amazon created this service as competition with Apple’s iTunes, allowing you to view movies and TV shows right on your Windows PC. Also, now with the new TiVo integration, Unbox+TiVo directly competes with iTV (Apple’s new set-top Mac that exists to play iTunes content on your TV).
As an aside, my test system is a pretty outdated Sempron 2600+, 2GB of memory, and a NVidia 6800XT with 256MB; it can play Quake 3 extremely well, but anything beyond that, eh, not so well. This is really the low end of usability on high performance applications today; by far, it is below average without question. The test video is Final Flight of the Osiris, the 9 minute video from The Animatrx produced by the Square film production unit that produced Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. As I have the DVD for The Animatrix I can see what the difference is side by side.
Unbox does not work with Linux. At all. Not in Wine (installer freaks out), and don’t even bother trying in VMWare due to lack of video card acceleration (this may change in the future, however, as VMWare wants to pass acceleration through to X at some point). This alone makes me want to severely dislike the product; not only this, if I owned a Mac, it doesn’t work on Macs either. If I was scoring this on a 10 point scale, Amazon has already lost 5 points.
So, to perform any video quality testing, I had to reboot to XP, something I very rarely do as Wine and Windows in VMWare does everything I need to do. Just to make what I said clear, I will never ever use Unbox again outside of this try-out as I refuse to reboot to just watch a movie; but for just this once, I’ll allow it.
The application itself uses a standard MSI installer, and is easy to use and figure out. I had no problems installing it, and playback performed fine on my test system with no hiccups. On my 3mbps DSL, within 3 minutes the player was ready to play Osiris, and by 9 minutes (or about 6 minutes into the film) the video was finished downloading.
Osiris used about 220 megs, and was encoded with the VC-1 codec (as are all Unbox videos). Compared to mplayer playing straight from the DVD using -vf pp=ac for post-processing, the DVD is noticeably sharper and more detailed. Comparatively, you may not be able to notice this on a 480i/p TV, but you will notice this on a display that is at least 853×480 (a 720×480 16:9 DVD stretched to 1:1 pixel ratio), which includes virtually every computer monitor in use, and also 720p and 1080p TVs.
So, between the fact it won’t run on Linux, or Macs, or Video iPods, and only on Windows or handhelds that support Microsoft’s PlayForSure (which even Zunes don’t support), I cannot see an actual point to Unbox at this time. The TiVo integration is nifty, but just like Apple’s iTV and on-demand services provided by cable, satellite, and telephone companies, it is a very niche market.
At this time, I cannot recommend Unbox for use by any user, let alone Linux ones. I give Unbox a 0 out 10 ten for Linux and Mac users and 0 out of 10 for Windows users. Spend your money elsewhere, such as on the original discs, they’re well worth the money.
